I know, it’s more than a month I published a blog post about calculator reboot
status. But don’t worry, also if I didn’t write any post, Bartosz and
I worked hard on it, and now it should be ready to become the default calculator
app on the phone, we just need a green light by the QA team!

As usual, please report any bug you find on Launchpad, so we can fix them!

Since is since end of January I don’t write a post on calculator, I describe all
the things we did, also if some of these features are available on the store
since a while.

New features
Universal brackets

This is a feature by Bartosz: we don’t have anymore two buttons for brackets
(one for ( and one for )), but now there is only one button. When you press
it, it magically understand if you need a open or a close bracket. Seems
incredible, but it works very well. Give it a try and if you find a case where
it doesn’t work, please report it to us.

Clear formula

Now with long click on clear button you delete all the formula. Don’t waste your
time anymore!

Editing calculation from history

You want to reuse a old calc you did? Just try to swipe left the calc ;-)

New design for keyboard

We have some new design specs: we will implement them after the release of
actual reboot. Meanwhile, we changed the keyboard accordingly.

Empty state in favourite

We added an Empty state in favourite mode so now users know how to use that
feature. I know it’s a bit confusing, we will improve it with new new design
in next weeks.

Translations

Thanks to Ubuntu community the calculator now it’s available in a lot of
languages. They’re amazing, work hard and we often forget them. So, this is my
personal thanks for you all translators! We love you!

If you don’t have the app in your language, take a look to our
translation page and help us :-)

Full changelog

Here the changelog with features we added. Missing revisions are translations. I
don’t report them because the commit message is always the same (Launchpad
automatic translations update.), so it isn’t useful to understand which
languages have new translations. Please see this page to have a full
vision on translations status:

The Internet of Things is driving an abundant amount of investment to the middleware tier. This involves activity among larger companies and numerous start-ups in developing platforms. The good news is that many of these platforms are using some common standards, noted Ian Skerrett, vice president of marketing and ecosystem at the Eclipse Foundation.

Technology wars are predictable. Every new wave of gadgetry brings a fight over who will be the next king of the software hill. The next big battle is brewing over control of the Internet of Things marketplace.

The IoT is quietly gaining momentum as companies develop software to connect all sorts of consumer products to the Internet. Consumers see only convenience and extensions to their always-on mobile devices. Product makers see a pathway to streaming data that can be monetized from buyers’ connections.

Could history be ripe for repeating itself as open source begins to take on the current, yet unsustainable, walled-garden core of the IoT? Based on the victories in some early skirmishes, innovations developed by open source start-ups may be the David in the here-again fight against proprietary Goliaths.

Friday the 13th was my day. In so many different ways. I received a package which was addressed to Rhonda D'Vine with a special hoodie in it. The person at the post office desk asked me whether it was for my partner, my response was a (cowardly) "no, it's my pseudonym" but that settled any further questions and I got my package.

Later I received an email which made me hyper happy (but which I can't share right now, potentially later).

In the evening there was the WortMacht FemSlam (WordMight FemSlam) poetry slam to which the host asked me to attend just the day before. I was hyper nervous about it. The room was fully packed, there were even quite some people who didn't have a place to sit and were standing at the side. I presented Mermaids because I wasn't able to write anything new on the topic. One would think I am attached enough to the poem by now to not be nervous about it, but it was the environment that made my legs shake like hell while presenting. Gladly I hope it wasn't possible to see it enough under my skirt, but given that it was the first time that I presented it in my home town instead of the "anonymous" internet made me extra anxious. In the end I ended up in place 5 of 7 attendees, which I consider a success given that it was the only text presented in English and not in typical poetry slam style.
(Small addition to the last part: I've been yesterday to the Free Hugs Vienna event at the Schloss Schönbrunn, and one of the people I hugged told me I know you, I've seen you at the FemSlam!. That was extra sweet. :))

I'm happy that I was notified about the FemSlam on such short notice, it was a great experience. So today's entry goes out to the host of that event. This is about Yasmo. One can just be envious about what she already accomplished in her still young life. And she is definitely someone to watch out for in the years to come. I have to excuse to my readers who don't understand German yet again, but I'll get back to something English next time, I promise. :)

Wer hat Angst vorm weißen Mann: Most straight-to-the-point line of the lyrics is Wie kann es sein, dass es immer noch diesen Jolly-Buntstift gibt, der "Hautfarbe" heißt?" (How is it possible that there is still this jolly crayon called "colour of the skin"?)

Wo kommst du her?: Not a song but one of her great slam poetry texts that I love since I first heard it.

It bothers me since a while that Web Apps on the Ubuntu Phone have their back button at the top left of the screen. It bothers me even more that the toolbar constantly collapses and expands during browsing … most of the time it does that for me when I just want to tap on a link. The page content suddenly moves 50px up or down…

Since Dekko exists on the Ubuntu Phone I became a heavy user of it for reading my mails and I really fell in love with the new bottom menu that Dan Chapman integrated so nicely (based on the circle menu work from Nekhelesh Ramananthan)

So this weekend it struck me to simply combine a WebView with this menu work to ge a shiny bottom navigation menu. I grabbed the recent google plus app from Szymon Waliczek, the latest source of Dekko and some bits from the webbrowser-app tree to combine them into a new webapp-container like framework.

You can find an experimental G+ click package (one that surely wins the contest for the ugliest icon) here.

I pushed the code to launchpad together with a README that describes how you can use it in your own WebApp, you can branch it with:

MakuluLinux Cinnamon is a freely distributed, easy-to-use, easy-to-install, portable and open source desktop-oriented operating system based on the award-winning Debian GNU/Linux distribution and built around the beautiful, lightweight and modern Cinnamon desktop environment.

Its claimed as a very first x64 Edition for Makulu Linux family. This release is special for so many reasons, It is sure to mark a major milestone, not just for Makulu, but considering what is inside, the whole of the linux world.

Horrible event that really want to avoided is data loss because of broken harddisks. But, you still can do something with your harddisks if that event occurs. By utilizing ddrescue, a good tools for save your data, you still can get back your data.

GNU ddrescue is a program that copies data from one file or block device (hard disk, cd/dvd-rom, etc) to another, it is a tool to help you to save data from crashed partition i.e. it is a data recovery tool. It tries to read and if it fails it will go on with the next sectors, where tools like dd will fail. If the copying process is interrupted by the user it is possible to continue at any position later. It can copy backwards.

The Ubuntu Community Council is the primary community (i.e., non-technical) governance body for the Ubuntu project. In this series of 7 interviews, we go behind the scenes with the community members who were elected in 2013 serve on this council with Mark Shuttleworth.

In this, our fifth interview, we talk with Daniel Holbach who shares some details about his work at Canonical, projects he’s been involved with in the Ubuntu community and some wisdom for newcomers to Ubuntu.

What do you do for a career?

I work for Canonical and will celebrate my 10th work anniversary later this year. I still enjoy it a lot. I learned loads, got to know many great people and made many new friends. Back in the early days I worked alongside Sébastien Bacher. The two of us basically were the “Desktop team”. Although I was quite used to working with our developer community beforehand, at some stage Canonical recognised Community work formally as something which deserved its own team. This is where I still am and still what I like a lot.

What was your first computing experience?

At home we always had computers as far as I can remember. I remember several Apple II models both at home or my dad’s work office I “typed” on when I was maybe four or five years old. From thereon I played on computers, or had my dad show me what he was working on. Some time later I learned a bit of programming, when I was maybe ten. Back then most of my programming consisted of changing small bits in games written in Basic or Pascal or copying stuff from “code listings” from computer magazines.

How long have you been involved with Ubuntu? And how long on the Ubuntu Community Council?

I got to know Michael Vogt through a friend we had in common when I was studying in Dortmund. One day in 2004 he said “I’m going to work on this thing based on Debian, do you want to try it?” Because I had a bit of spare time on my hands and was welcoming any distraction (I was working on my thesis back then), I said “Of course”. Hours later I had an invitation from Jeff Waugh in my Inbox. I upgraded my Debian machine to Ubuntu and was immediately hooked. Looking back, I think it was a mixture of both the heavy emphasis on new social standards in the open source world plus the willingness of many good developers to answer my questions which got me involved.

If Launchpad is not lying, I have been part of the CC since May 2007.

What are some of the projects you’ve worked on in Ubuntu over the years?

Many. I’ll just try to quickly mention a few which immediately come up in my mind:

I was part of the planning of many initiatives like the new software store, some of our development/governance processes.
Fun things like our 24h Ubuntu Community team marathon.

I’ve been privileged to work with many great people in many many teams, be it QA, documentation, our development teams, internal teams in Canonical, customers and many more.

What is your focus in Ubuntu today?

Lately I worked quite a bit on documentation for app developers. This was a very interesting experience. Basically our team was taking the input from the SDK team, the various Unity development teams and worked together with them and many others to come up with a story which app developers could understand and would enjoy to be part of. This resulted in a new developer.ubuntu.com site, which today is translatable and will soon be more closely tied to API docs and a snippets database. I worked with Chinese translators, helped with formatting, contributed some fixes to the site, worked with development teams to get last minute bugs fixed and created some training materials. It’s insanely gratifying to see developers jump in and write apps out of the blue, especially for a phone which is just now being sold online. Nuts!

Now I just worked on a help app for Ubuntu devices, and soon I hope to look a bit more at snappy, core and Ubuntu things.

Do you contribute to other free/open source projects? Which ones?

Not so much lately. For some time I contributed to xwax, as I was using it to DJ, but right now, there’s nothing to fix in it – it just works great.

If you were to give a newcomer some advice about getting involved with Ubuntu, what would it be?

Find something you’re interested. Something you’d like to help with, extend, change or fix. Don’t be shy, ask around how you can help, which docs you should have a look at. Start with small contributions, ask how to get them deployed/integrated, don’t give up too easily. Sometimes the people you’re asking are working on something differently and might not know the answer or sometimes it just takes a bit longer. Don’t let yourself be discouraged. Ubuntu people are a lot of fun to hang out with. Join a few meetings, chat with your team mates, be proactive, propose a hangout or a skype session to discuss things. Ubuntu is a very social undertaking.

Do you have any other comments else you wish to share with the community?

Ubuntu is in constant change, just like the world we live in. There are always new experiments, new things to be tried out, new challenges. That’s why the focus of people also changes quite a bit. Change never comes lightly and also comes at a cost in communities. Some things didn’t change over time though: Ubuntu is still free, open source, it’s there for everyone, very social and in the center of everything IT: desktop, laptops, servers, cloud, phones, tablets, IoT. I’m very impressed with where we are today.

New to this series? Check out our previous two Community Council interviews:

As I hinted at in my last post, apport-noui, which will enable automatic crash reporting, is now available in the -proposed repository for Trusty. If you want to test it follow the instructions in the SRU bug report. Otherwise, it will be made available in -updates next week.

Like most people, I find myself using the same VoIP options everyone else is using. Thankfully, these days there are far more options available than what we might think.

One of the popular VoIP applications in Linux is Skype which coming from any other platforms, Linux VoIP clients often find themselves being compared to Skype. Foss advocates are usually quick to point out the flaws in trusting Skype with your voice calls, yet the fact is that this is what most people use. There are more than one alternative applications for VoIP communications in Linux.

Today, I’ll look at these options and also explore up-and-coming alternatives as well.

This is simply awesome!I cannot believe how simple it is to create your webapp for Ubuntu Phone.You just have to go to this web site: https://developer.ubuntu.com/webapp-generatorFill in the fileds and click on the submit button.

You will get a click package downloaded to you PC.This click package can be installed on your Phone for testing, you just have to connect your phone to your PC with a USB cord and type in terminal:

Cross compiling Go packages to ARM is easy unless they rely on C libraries via cgo, in which case C cross-compilers and libraries built for the target are required on the host, and the invocation is not straightforward at all.

Dimitri's post shows a way to do it using armhf chroots, and inspired by it I put together a docker image that does slightly more and can be used as if it were a simple command. The image uses a Gopackage built from a PPA , since the one in the archive does not have a CGO enabled ARM cross compiler.

Matthias Clasen has released the latest GTK+ 3.15 development release that’s near final and about ready to be named GTK+ 3.16.

Yesterday’s GTK+ 3.15.12 release brings improvements to the GtkCellRendererPixbuf, GtkEntry and GtkMenuButton alterations, and the GTK+ Wayland back-end now has support for HiDPI cursors. There’s also various bug-fixes in GTK+ 3.15.12 like crash fixes and Pixman warnings. The official changes can be seen outlined via this Git commit.